Last weekend marked the launch of the great American Christmas film season at the box office. Two of the movies in which much hope has been invested might be seen as competing parables for our troubled economic times.

Enchanted is Disney’s latest twist on the traditional saccharine-fuelled fairy story. An animated princess, complete with the usual retinue of royal suitor and cute, furry animals, is banished from cartoonland by an evil stepmother and winds up an innocent at large in live-action feature format on the cynical streets of New York. There, in a cleverly modern take on the classic story, she finds true love in the form of an embittered divorce lawyer and they live happily ever after.

The Mist, an MGM adaptation of a Stephen King novel, is from a wholly different narrative stable. A bunch of people in a quiet Maine town find themselves holed up in a supermarket when a mysterious fog descends and envelops them in a nasty swarm of terrifying creatures. This being a Stephen King thriller, needless to say, lots of very bad things happen to innocent people.

As a contest, it was no contest. The Disney princess, played by sweetness-personified Amy Adams, romped home, of course. In fact, raking in more than $50 million (£24 million) over the five-day weekend, Enchanted became the second-highest-grossing Thanksgiving launch so far, the best since Toy Story 2 in 1999. The Mist came in at a foggy $13 million.

Now I realise you can read too much into the cinema-going habits of Americans at Thanksgiving. I realise, too, that these are of somewhat different genres. My five young daughters are more your typical movie-goers over the holiday period and they were not alone in being enchanted by Disney.

But with a bit of imagination, you can construct a nice metaphor from this one-sided movie contest. Given a choice between a bit of sentimental old fluff about the possibility of true love even in cynical old Manhattan and the sum of their worst nightmares in a supermarket in Maine, Americans voted with their wallets for the triumph of hope over fear.

And, as it happens, Enchanted is more or less how you might describe the American economy right now. While commentators see only the approaching Mist of a housing meltdown, financial crisis and collapsing dollar, real Americans are still living through something of a fairytale.

Despite all the bad things that are supposed to be happening, the economy continues to grow. In fact, in this world, even the supposedly bad things are good.

Take, for the moment, that falling dollar. As is now well known, the US currency is down almost 40 per cent in the past 5½ years. If you had asked the average gloomy economist back then what would be the implications of such a steep fall in the dollar, the answer would have included a good deal of pessimistic conventional wisdom.

Such a sharp drop in the value of the currency would, it was generally assumed, spell real trouble for the value of US assets. Demand for US Treasury bonds would surely fall sharply. In fact, the decline in the dollar’s value would be both cause and effect of a flight from dollar-denominated assets.

Interest rates, which move inversely to bond prices, would, therefore, surge, presumably prompting a serious retrenchment. Foreigners would surely offload many of their US equities, too, and Americans would not be far behind them.

Then there would be an inflationary surge. A 40 per cent decline in the dollar’s value, would, other things being equal, push up import prices by a similar amount and the feed-through to the broader economy would be swift and painful.

But what has happened? In the past 5½ years, US Treasury prices actually have soared. In early 2002 the yield on the benchmark ten-year Treasury was about 5.5 per cent. It is now about 4 per cent. Equities, on a broad measure, are up by about 50 per cent in the past five years.

Inflation? It has gone up, but hardly enough to notice. In December 2002, the core consumer price index (all prices except volatile food and energy costs) was up 1.9 per cent from a year earlier. Last month it was up to 2.2 per cent, still comfortably in line with what we have come to see as price stability.

Now there are lots of specific reasons that explain these unexpectedly benign outcomes: foreign central banks still buying US Treasuries; global savings keeping demand strong for all US assets; prices held low by international competition. And it is still true that we face serious challenges.

But when you think of all the factors that could have produced disaster in the past five years – not just a dollar collapse but soaring oil prices and an overextended housing market – you have to conclude that something quite fundamental has changed. The US and global economies continue to demonstrate a remarkable structural resilience and flexibility unseen in modern history.

Looking at the economic performance of the US, of course, most pundits still prefer the Stephen King metaphor to Walt Disney’s. But who would have thought it? The real world looks much more like Disney.

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive